Beamforming is a signal processing technique used in systems having an array of antenna elements to control the transmit and/or receive direction of the array. Systems that use beamforming may include radars (e.g., synthetic-aperture radars), satellite communication systems, phased-array antennas, wireless communications, radio astronomy, etc. For large antenna arrays, beamforming may require very significant and complex data movement and manipulation.
Before beamforming is applied, each antenna element's radio frequency (RF) input signal may be digitized by an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter and channelized by a channelizer. The channelizer breaks up the bandwidth of the respective digitized RF signal into narrow-band sections of the bandwidth, which may be referred to as “channels” or “subchannels.” This signal processing substantially increases the data bandwidth in the system, especially as the number of antenna elements and/or “subchannels” grows. In conventional beamforming systems, a router comprising a large-complex network of switching elements is used to route only the data of interest to a set of beamformers to form a desired beam. The set of beamformers is less than the number of antenna elements since a typical beam only requires a subset of the antenna elements.
The router requires both complex routing control and data synchronization methods to ensure that, when a new beam is formed, the router simultaneously switches the desired channelized data from the desired antenna elements to the beamformers to form the new beam. In doing this, the router has to ensure that it does not drop or miss route data when changing to a different beam. The router becomes increasingly large, costly, complex, and power hungry as the system grows.